In "De anima" 3.5, Aristotle argues for the existence of a second intellect, the so-called "Agent Intellect." The logical structure of his argument turns on a distinction between different types of soul, rather than different faculties within a given soul; and the attributes he assigns to the second species make it clear that his concern here -- as at the climax of his other great works, such as the "Metaphysics," the "Nicomachean" and the "Eudemian Ethics" -- is the difference between (...) the human and the divine. If this is right, we needn't go on a wild goose chase trying to invent a role for the so-called Agent Intellect to play. God moves our intellects as he moves the heavenly spheres, "as a beloved": he constitutes the complete actualization towards which all of our intellectual striving is directed. Aristotle regards such final causation as an efficient cause, but not in a way that would make it part of what we would call the causal processes or mechanisms of human psychology. But, he would insist, it is essential for appreciating who we are and what our place is in the world. (shrink)

This paper presents a detailed reconstruction of Theophrastus’ account of human ontogeny, which is built around Aristotle’s notoriously difficult claim in Generation of Animals II 3 that “νοῦς alone enters from without.” I argue that this account (which is known to us via quotes from Theophrastus’ de Anima II and On Motion I) provides a viable alternative to the traditional trilemma between naturalist traducianism, creationism, and pre-existence, as well as offering an attractive but so far unappreciated interpretation of Aristotle’s account (...) of human ontogeny. More specifically, I argue that the extant evidence poses a challenge to the two dominant interpretations of “νοῦς from without” in the last decades: a dialectical one, according to which Aristotle ultimately rejects this claim, and a naturalizing one (often inspired by Alexander of Aphrodisias) that obliterates the essential difference between νοῦς and the other parts of the soul. (shrink)